Award winning and bestselling author, actress and playwright Leanna Renee Hieber grew up in rural Ohio inventing ghost stories. The dramatic, historic, spiritual and paranormal are the primary forces in her lyrical, atmospheric fiction.

While performing in the regional theatre circuit, her one-act plays such as Favorite Lady, were published, produced, won awards and continue to be produced in colleges and festivals around the country. She has adapted works of 19th Century literature for the professional stage.

She hit the fantasy fiction scene with her novella Dark Nest which won the 2009 Prism Award for excellence in Futuristic, Fantasy and Paranormal Romance.

Her critically acclaimed debut novel, The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker is the first in her Strangely Beautiful series of ghostly, Gothic Victorian Fantasy novels published by Dorchester Publishing and landed on Barnes & Noble's mass market and overall Bestseller List. The book was named one of the Top Ten Books of 2009 by Beyond Her Book Publishers Weekly readers poll. The Darkly Luminous Fight for Persephone Parker (Strangely Beautiful #2), releases in April 2010 and the series continues again in October 2010.

The hard road to Strangely Beautiful publication began while she was working long hours as an intern at the Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival. She went through an aching journey of countless rejection letters due to the cross-genre nature of her work. Nearly nine long years later, she and her Strangely Beautiful world found a home in New York with Dorchester.

A member of Actors Equity Association (AEA), the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), Leanna works often in television.

Leanna is represented by New York literary agent Nicholas Roman Lewis and is a member of the Romance Writers of America (RWA) the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) and the Horror Writers Association (HWA) and the International Thriller Writers (ITW). She is very proud to be a co-founder of Lady Jane's Salon Reading Series in New York along with authors Hope Tarr, Maya Rodale and Ron Hogan of Beatrice.com. The Salon showcases talent in the many sub-genres of romance and women's fiction and partners with charity supporting women in need and donates gently used romance novels.

When not writing or on set, she loves a good Goth club, singing soprano in choir and adventuring about her adopted hometown of New York City, where she resides with her real-life hero and her beloved rescued lab rabbit Persebunny, Queen of the Undereverything.